Now don't start feeling bad if you don't have thousands of unread messages on your laptop. It's not actually an indicator of your success that you get a lot of rubbish sent to you. On the other hand, it probably is a sign of impending doom if you are getting very few e-mails.

A year or so ago I had a short meeting with one of the now-former board members. This was when the bank was starting to melt and we were all wondering what senior management were doing about it.

He put his BlackBerry on the desk and about 15 minutes later it buzzed. He picked it up and peered over his glasses at the screen, carefully pushing the buttons with one finger while holding the BlackBerry in his other hand, the way inexperienced users do. When he was finished, he turned back to me and said: "Damn e-mail. You know I get 15, maybe 20 messages a day on that thing!"

A couple of months later, the government was injecting capital into our bank and he was jobless.

I get far more e-mails than that, far more than I would like. Reading and responding to them takes up far too much of my day. Reading e-mails is the first thing I do in the morning, assuming it is not one of those days when there is something wrong with my computer.

As there is always at least a screen full of e-mails, I read them in order of importance rather than chronologically. So first I read anything from friends, then family, then The Onion Weekly Dispatch, then from clients, my boss and staff. I then delete the garbage I get from headhunters, people organising conferences and anything from our communications department.

Instead of replying as I go, I leave the windows open for the e-mails that I need to reply to as a reminder to write a response later in the day.

I had a similar system when I was a student. I would feel like I had achieved something if I went to the library and photocopied the bits of textbooks that I ought to read. Once I had completed my photocopying I would put the pages in my bag and head to the university bar. At some point, most likely the night before I had an assignment due in or an exam, I would gather up all those photocopies and wish that I had read them sooner.

I am more disciplined than that with e-mails, but I do generally like to procrastinate a bit before replying. That is, except for e-mails that annoy me. I have a system for that, too. If I get an e-mail from someone obnoxious, or from someone who has written something obnoxious, or both, I will write an angry reply immediately. This can take some time, depending on how annoyed the message has made me, and I always like to do a good job of an angry e-mail.

Once I have a response with the appropriate level of logic and vitriol, I delete it. Actually, sending someone a nasty e-mail is about the least productive thing you can do. It will always be misinterpreted, and even if you are right you will still look like the bad guy. Just the act of writing it, though, is therapeutic enough for me. Once I have thus expelled the annoyance from my system, I can write the reply I should write, having already written and deleted the reply I want to send.

The other system I have is called punctuation. I am one of the only people in my office, as far as I can tell, who still use punctuation in e-mails. It is a sad fact that as communication gets easier, grammar and punctuation deteriorate. For example, 100 years ago, if you wanted to know how your brother in the next town was getting on, you might take out a piece of parchment, dip a feather in a pot of ink and start your letter with something like: "I write to enquire as to your state of health. The great distance between us has had the inevitable consequence of rendering our meetings increasingly infrequent."

Today you would take out your mobile phone and text: "how r u ltns." For anyone over the age of 14, "ltns" translates to "long time no see". In fact, I suspect teenagers fluent in txtspk don't bother with the "how" part and just write "hru ltns". This is more than an absence of grammar, it's an absence of words.

Even though plenty of my colleagues seem to think e-mails require no grammar, punctuation or even basic courtesies, like "Dear Alan" or "Best regards", I still cling to the idea that they do.

I also try to cling to the idea that e-mail is as bad as it's going to get. But I suspect that we are in the midst of a long descent into increasingly easy and pointless communication. I can now use instant messaging with colleagues, follow CEOs on Twitter and get real-time updates from our communications department on my BlackBerry, covering issues such as "the importance of a clean desk" or "security tips for passwords".

And how much of this instant communication is actually useful? - srsly afsik nm.